(Price is in € EUR)
For context, six months ago I bought a renewed Thinkpad X395 for exactly this price and I got: An actually decent CPU and not something as powerful as a Wii, 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB of actual M.2 SSD, a really nice 1080p Touchscreen, really nice build quality with metal and a nice backlit keyboard. Heck, even when I bought a cheap laptop in May 2020 it was much better than this and it even was brand new for the same price.
I know this CPU very well, for this price you are getting something that has trouble playing a Youtube video in 1080p at 60 FPS and can’t even run the latest version of Minecraft at above 10 FPS. Now imagine this combined with Windows 11 and only 4 GB of RAM…
No, this is not because of the current hardware crysis, this is pure greed. But hey, 1 year of Microslop 365 is included!
I thought windows 11 needed way more than 4GB of ram
I have a handed down Surface Go 2 with 4GB of RAM. The thing was damn near unusable with its stock Windows installation. I’ve put Mint on it now and it’s actually a nice little machine.
Windows Vista also needed more than 1GB and some manufacturers still sold their subpar devices with it. Some things never change.
Windows Vista launch was a fucking mess. My office bought a laptop for a coworker in early 2007 that shipped with Vista but didn’t have Vista-compatible drivers for the on-board audio. They had to buy an external USB sound card.
That’s hilarious! :D A friend of mine bought a Sony Vaio laptop back then which had a 64bit CPU, but only 32bit drivers. Not even XP, only Vista, so you couldn’t even downgrade.
The thing with Vista was it was it was th3 first really major rebuild of Windows in a long time. Going to 98, ME, XP, etc you had increased minimum specs, but things like drivers and shit generally worked fine, so as long as you had the necessary RAM and processor to run the OS, you could just install the new version and shit would probably work.
So when Vista came along, the manufacturers selling existing models just shipped with the new OS expecting everything to work without testing.
True, but it also didn’t help that Microsoft set really low system specs for “Windows Vista Ready”. So we had a lot of computers with an official Vista badge that weren’t really capable of running it well.
The specs to earn that badge were 512MB of RAM and an 800MHz processor, which was absolutely not enough for it.
Yeah. They published the minimum specs to get the OS to run at all with zero consideration for running actual software.